When I saw the headline I thought "oh no, not string concatenation again... we have had scores of these thread before...", but this is a rather interesting problem. The OP says he's not a database developer, but why is he then fiddling with internal database operations? Wouldn't it be better to go back to the database developers and have them look into parallel processing. I'm sure that Oracle databases can do parallel processing by now...
Sigmund -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
